CHICAGO — Three major exhibitions devoted to Pop art opened in 2015: The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern in London; International Pop at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (opening soon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art); and Pop Art Design, still on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago. Each broadened the purview of this art movement as a primarily Western (American) phenomenon by unearthing lesser-known artists to provide a global view of art in the 1960s and ‘70s. But, at the same time that these exhibitions effectively changed our notion of Pop art, they also lost something in translation. Each of the shows, heavily padded with work that proved a point, made us wonder what, exactly, the point was. By cracking open the geographic reach of Pop art, the exhibitions became amorphous, losing sight of what lay at the core of this art movement.
